Ex-cop says he didn't kill Illinois girl in '57

SEATTLE 
The "iron-clad alibi" of a former police officer arrested in the 1957 murder of a young Illinois girl is based largely on whether military personnel records from the time demonstrate that he was out of town when she vanished.

But it's not clear those records still exist.

Jack Daniel McCullough, 71, told The Associated Press in a jailhouse interview Thursday night that he had nothing to do with the death of 7-year-old Maria Ridulph, and he wants her killer brought to justice. Her disappearance terrified the small farming town of Sycamore, about 50 miles west of Chicago, and drew the personal interest of then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

He stuck to the same alibi he gave when first questioned by investigators more than half a century ago, when he was 18: that he could not have committed the murder because he had traveled to Chicago that day for military medical exams before enlisting in the Air Force.

McCullough said he didn't believe investigators had ever tried to verify that he was in Chicago that day for medical tests - and records of those tests should still exist in his file at the National Archives repository of military personnel records in St. Louis, he said.

"St. Louis will have records of everything," he said. "If somebody would go there, it would exonerate me."

A fire at the archives in 1973 destroyed millions of military personnel records - including about 75 percent of records of Air Force personnel discharged between 1947 and 1964 whose last names came alphabetically after H. McCullough left the Air Force in 1960.

A clerk at the repository told The Associated Press Friday that no records could be made public without McCullough's signed permission, and there was no immediate way to determine whether his records were among those destroyed. Officials would have to hunt through boxes of paper files to see if his was there.

"I have an iron-clad alibi," McCullough insisted. "I did not commit a murder."

McCullough, then known as John Tessier, lived near the girl and matched the description of the suspect given by Ridulph's 8-year-old friend, Cathy Sigman, who last saw her on Dec. 3, 1957, at about 6 p.m. Sigman said she left Maria with a young man and ran home to get some mittens; when she returned 15 minutes later, the two were gone.

Thousands of people joined in the search for the missing girl, and many kept their own children locked indoors lest they be nabbed next. Maria's remains were found the following April, about 120 miles away.

McCullough was arrested in Seattle last week after investigators said new evidence - including one record that does exist - undermined his alibi. He's being held in the King County Jail on a fugitive charge pending his return to Illinois.

According to a police affidavit in the case, last year, McCullough's high school girlfriend discovered his train ticket to Chicago behind a framed photograph of them - and it was unused. Detectives wrote that when he was questioned in 1957, he claimed he had traveled to Chicago by train.